A Michigan jury has awarded the family of an 81-year-old woman $21 million in damages after staff at a Michigan hospital mixed up her CT scan results with those of another patient and operated on her brain instead of her jaw, according to a report by the Detroit Free Press.
Bimla Nayyar was admitted to Oakwood Hospital in Dearborn in January 2012 for a procedure to treat her bilateral jaw displacement. Hospital staff confused her CT scans with those of another patient and thought she had bleeding in her brain and needed immediate surgery, the Detroit Free Press reported. Nayyar never recovered from the surgery and died in hospice care on March 11 of that year.
The hospital did not disclose to the family the full extent of its error until details emerged at trial, the Nayyar family's attorney, Geoffrey Fieger, said in the article.
![Images show the pectoralis muscles of a healthy male individual who never smoked (age, 66 years; height, 178 cm; body mass index [BMI, calculated as weight in kilograms divided by height in meters squared], 28.4; number of cigarette pack-years, 0; forced expiratory volume in 1 second [FEV1], 97.6% predicted; FEV1: forced vital capacity [FVC] ratio, 0.71; pectoralis muscle area [PMA], 59.4 cm2; pectoralis muscle volume [PMV], 764 cm3) and a male individual with a smoking history and chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder (COPD) (age, 66 years; height, 178 cm; BMI, 27.5; number of cigarette pack-years, 43.2, FEV1, 48% predicted; FEV1:FVC, 0.56; PMA, 35 cm2; PMV, 480.8 cm3) from the Canadian Cohort Obstructive Lung Disease (i.e., CanCOLD) study. The CT image is shown in the axial plane. The PMV is automatically extracted using the developed deep learning model and overlayed onto the lungs for visual clarity.](https://img.auntminnie.com/mindful/smg/workspaces/default/uploads/2026/03/genkin.25LqljVF0y.jpg?auto=format%2Ccompress&crop=focalpoint&dpr=2&fit=crop&h=167&q=70&w=250)
